But I have no siblings and only tenuous relationships with my extended family. When I grow old, it will just be me and my husband and his family, his three adult nieces and whatever families they may have, his various far-flung cousins, but I will otherwise be entirely alone in the world, without any close biological connections. I have only two first cousins, one of whom has children, and I have had no contact with this extended family in nearly two decades, nor do I foresee that situation changing since they have had nothing whatsoever to say to me since I came out. Apart from my aunt, no one in the extended family bothered to acknowledge the announcements I sent when Andrew and I had our civil union in 2005. It feels as though I have been lopped off the family tree.
Part of what makes life bearable as we age is a sense of direct biological connection to other people. If the biological bond was not so important, why else would adopted children so often seek out their birth parents and vice versa? For the children, part of the drive to know the people who made them must be about seeing who they are likely to become as they age, as well as wanting to know why those parents were unable to keep them in the first place. For the birth parents, it must be about knowing that some part of themselves will persist when they are gone, as well as wanting to explain why they had to make those painful choices or explain why the choice was not theirs to make.
I can’t help wanting biological connection despite knowing that the planet does not need another child, perhaps now least of all.
I can’t help it despite knowing that I might bring into the world a child who will have a horrendously difficult life, for whom the planet will become a radically unstable and unliveable place, where climatic and other forms of devastation seem destined to be the norm.
The impulse is not logical. It is hardwired, biological, even for a man like me.
We find ourselves at a colleague’s fiftieth birthday party where we meet a professor of human genetics. I tell her about our confusion over whether to pursue adoption or surrogacy, and explain how much about my own life seems to militate against my reproducing: the fact that I was nearly a full month late being born and that my mother nearly died from complications following the delivery, the fact that I turned out more attracted to men than to women.
These must be signs from the universe that I should not reproduce.
And yet, I say, I feel this powerful compulsion to have my own biological children.
The professor looks at me and smiles.
If that’s the case, then you have to listen to it, she says. The other factors are beside the point.
But surrogacy is expensive, and difficult, and what about all the ethical problems, I say.
She smiles again.
You’ll just have to find a way.
Now, when I write to ask her if I have remembered the conversation correctly, she responds suggesting that perhaps she was speaking to me then as a parent instead of a scientist. In any case, she says, the desire to have children is not a matter of logic. Some people feel the urge, others don’t, and the feeling can change as time passes. The drive to have children is primal, beyond rationality.
When I show my mother an earlier version of this chapter, she is quick to make a correction. She does not want me to think I was responsible for her nearly dying. The complications following my birth were medical in origin rather than biological or physiological. I should not blame myself for the trauma she suffered.
Does that correction, I wonder, make me feel less certain of the universe standing between me and reproduction?
It’s a question I still cannot answer.
SURROGATES
British law not only discourages surrogacy, it makes it all but structurally impossible. While surrogacy itself is legal, it is illegal to enter into a contract for surrogacy, illegal to advertise that you are a couple looking for a surrogate, illegal to advertise your willingness to be a surrogate, and illegal to pay a surrogate anything but reasonable costs. At birth, the surrogate mother is the legal parent to the child, even if she has no genetic connection. If she is married, her husband is the legal father. The intended parents, who do have a genetic connection (either a donor father using a third party’s donor egg, or an embryo from two opposite-sex parents that the intended mother cannot carry), have no rights whatsoever under the law. The intended parents must trust that the surrogate will keep her word and give up the baby to them at birth, and they must convince a court to issue a parental order. There have been cases of surrogates in Britain refusing to give up the children they have carried, and protracted legal battles by intended parents to secure parental orders.1
Despite these extraordinary risks, Andrew and I decide to explore this option. Because of the legal restrictions, there are no commercial surrogacy agencies as there are in the US, but instead registered charities that operate as introduction services for surrogates and would-be parents. The one that we settle on, which has the most positive online reviews at the time, runs regular introduction meetings. I read the website, heartened by stories of successful introductions, of couples and surrogates getting to know one another, of undergoing IVF treatment, of the failures and successes and hopes and happy results. It all suddenly seems possible. The only significant barrier we can see is negotiating our capacity to take such a risk, to have our hearts broken and find that the baby we would be expecting, genetically either mine or Andrew’s, was not going to be ours to raise, or that we would have to fight the surrogate in the courts to win the child who should by logic be ours.
But as I scan these stories I am half-conscious of another barrier: our difficulty in navigating British social relations. Introduction mixers, the charity’s website explains, happen at various locations, but usually pubs. Andrew and I have never felt comfortable in pubs, and neither of us has ever been able to explain to ourselves or to anyone else why we should feel so alienated by one of the most important arenas of social interaction in Britain. It is not only a question of sexuality – we feel no more at home in gay pubs or gay-friendly pubs. Perhaps this is a function of having grown up in puritanical societies, or being raised by older parents, or of not coming from a culture where drinking is the keystone of social interaction, but it is also about a sense I have of the British pub as a zone of latent violence where I always feel vulnerable.
Nonetheless, we decide we have to get past this. We wait for the charity to announce its next London mixer, preparing ourselves to appear more at ease than we actually will be.
When the announcement comes, the event has been scheduled at a chain pub in a remote part of London, just inside the M25, in a semi-rural area. Whether we drive or go by public transport, it will take hours to get there. More to the point, the location makes the event feel sordid. In the pictures online, the pub looks run-down, the kind of place where prostitutes and johns might meet, or where people would get drunk before lurking in nearby bushes, hoping for a quick fuck with a stranger. Choosing it for a mixer at which the most profound relationship of trust and mutual understanding has to be kindled suggests to us – Andrew in particular – that the surrogacy charity itself views the entire enterprise as if it has to be hidden from the public, out on the margins of the city. As if it were shameful or only barely legal. And perhaps it is both of those things.
We get cold feet. We decide not to go.
Over the coming years, friends – always women, usually older than us – will ask, ‘Don’t you know someone who could have a baby for you?’ No, we say. Our friends who might do this are either too old, or would probably be unwilling. I know I should not resent those friends who explicitly said at one time or another ‘I’d have a child for you but the first pregnancy was so difficult’ only then to have another child of their own. They owe nothing to me, not even that throwaway comment.
But neither the impulse to parent nor the emotions it triggers are logical.
And if these older women, our close friends and mentors, wise and ethical and progressive all, wonder about the possibility of a
friend having a child for us, is it really so unthinkable a suggestion?
I discover that a New York acquaintance in a same-sex relationship has convinced his sister to have a child for him as a traditional surrogate, using her own egg and my friend’s partner’s sperm. From the beginning, it goes badly. The sister decides she cannot manage the joint custody they informally agreed upon and the daughter she gives birth to now lives with her, only seeing her father and uncle for visits.
Meanwhile, friends in Paris, a male same-sex couple who both work in finance, have a son in the US through a surrogate. When we see them, they joke that instead of a Ferrari they now have a boy in a crib. The whole process cost them nearly two hundred thousand dollars.
Andrew and I do not have that kind of money, although my father could afford to pay for us to have a surrogate, even just get us most of the way there. When I raise this as a possibility, he suggests instead that he might come to live with us in London. And then, he says, I could help.
I tell him the British government has made such immigration impossible, but I see that he appreciates the situation with acute clarity: what I am asking for is a huge gift, as great a gift as the private undergraduate education he and my mother paid for. What he asks of me in return is a huge gift: my care of him as he ages, in the moment when I want to focus my attention on a child.
For many reasons, it is an exchange I cannot make.
I look again at other surrogacy options. The US is prohibitively expensive. In India, it is ethically out of the question, and in any case the laws soon shift to make it impossible for same-sex couples to travel there for surrogacy without lying and breaking the law. I think once more about the British surrogacy charities, their mixers and introduction parties, the air of shame and marginality that attaches to them. My heart sinks.
None of it looks possible.
And so, again, we find ourselves back at the beginning.
HUGO
Hugo is four, he is five, he is six. Over the course of three years I see him several times with his adoptive parents in Cape Town. They are both corporate lawyers who could afford surrogacy but have made the decision instead to adopt one of South Africa’s legion of orphans. The first time we meet Hugo we are having dinner with the family at their home in Constantia, around the corner from the botanical gardens. Their house is on a quiet street, the property surrounded by high walls. They employ a domestic worker who has a daughter Hugo’s age, whose English name is Patience. The children are playing together when we arrive, and our friend, the father, decides we need to go to the mall to buy groceries for dinner.
Andrew gets into the front passenger seat and I sit in the back with Hugo and Patience. The contrast between the two children is striking. Although Hugo, who was adopted at eighteen months, has not had to worry about food or security and has had highly attentive parenting, he is almost uncontrollable. He flops around in the back seat, he gets in my face, has no sense of personal space. Patience, who may well have had to worry about whether there would be enough food some days, and whose home life lacks the comforts and securities of Hugo’s, chatters away, asking me questions. If I were to choose which child to spend a day with, it would be Patience.
At the mall, Hugo cannot walk a straight line. He breaks from our friend’s hand when he tries to hold it, he crouches, he leaps, he runs this way and that, a pinball pinging off obstacles, smashed forward by internal levers.
Back at the house, Patience and her mother leave to make the long journey home to Khayelitsha by minibus taxi. Alone with our friends and Hugo, I am again conscious of the boy’s wriggling, fidgeting, his aggressive play with the dogs, the number of times his mother has to call him out on his behaviour. At dinner, Hugo cannot sit still. He seems more frenetic than most five-year-olds. His father gives him a huge bowl of ice cream and I think, what a long night they have before them, all that sugar coursing through the boy’s veins.
A year later I see them again when they come to a book launch I have at a Cape Town bookstore. Hugo and his parents are already there when I arrive, and Hugo is at the cash register with the owner. He is using the scanner to ring up a sale.
Do you know Hugo? I ask the owner.
No… but he’s very confident, the woman says, her face tightening with alarm.
I suggest to Hugo that he go find his parents, which he does, running pell-mell through the small space, locating our friends at the refreshments table.
Throughout my conversation with another author in front of an attentive audience, Hugo flings himself on the ground or speaks loudly and has to be silenced by his mother. Normal behaviour for a six-year-old, perhaps, or at least within the range of normal behaviour, and yet there are other children of the same age present, birth children of other friends, who sit quietly through the event.
Knowing that we have been thinking of trying to have children, our friends urge us, as they have in the past, to adopt from South Africa. I tell them that the government has recently made this much more difficult for people not resident in the country, and in any case, we’re not an opposite-sex couple, not like you. Does that make a difference, they ask? Yes, it appears to, I tell them. I’ve read stories that indicate same-sex couples adopting in South Africa are typically offered only those children who cannot be placed anywhere else, who have serious disabilities or health problems.
We would never get a child as healthy as Hugo, I tell them, not from here.
Years pass, and the next time I see Hugo it is clear he is beginning to settle into his life. Less clingy than I remember, he is also less frenzied, does well in school, and has a rich array of interests and hobbies. He is an excellent swimmer, and he switches between English and Afrikaans and Xhosa with ease and fluency.
Whatever our friends are doing, I can see that their parenting has had a remarkable effect, and this begins gradually to shift my sense of what is possible.
STAGES
Surrogacy in America is too expensive, surrogacy in India is legally and ethically impossible, surrogacy in Britain requires too great a leap of faith and too much negotiation of cultural habits that continue to bewilder or alienate us, and adopting from abroad would be more complicated and fraught with risk, we suspect, than adopting in Britain.
And so, a year after meeting with Mary the social worker, we decide to file papers starting the adoption approval process. The government has launched a drive to recruit more adopters because there is a shortage, and we are caught up in that campaign. We will be vetted by social workers, and if we are approved, they will help us find a match.
It all sounds so simple.
The approval process has two stages. Stage 1 requires us each to fill out a fifty-page questionnaire and attend four days of workshops run by the council’s adoption team, as well as meetings with the social worker who has been assigned to our case.
When Eleanor, who is Sri Lankan by birth, comes to our flat at the end of September 2013, she is nothing like what Andrew or I have been fearing. She is young, intelligent, working on a master’s degree, considering pursuing a doctorate. She slips into the conversation that her sister, a writer who lives in Melbourne, has a female partner, and she does this so deftly we instantly feel at ease.
We talk about our backgrounds, our sense of ourselves as migrants, three migrants at the same table. We talk about writing and education and psychology. She asks us our advice about doctoral studies. If this is the person who will be vetting us over the next eight months, I cannot foresee any problems.
Except that Eleanor is pregnant.
Is this a test in the way that meeting with Mary at the beginning of the process, more than a year earlier, might also have been a test? Do they deploy pregnant social workers to prospective adopters as a means of gauging how able we are to handle the reality of being confronted with people who have biological children, whose route to parenthood is so much simpler than our own? Is it cruel to dispatch a visibly pregnant woman to interview would-be adopters, or is it a logical
choice, a way of seeing how serious and well adjusted we might already be, or, conversely, to see how liable to being triggered by such a vision we might equally – even concomitantly – be.
Our affective response to Eleanor’s pregnancy is not the problem. But her inability to stay with us through the whole process is.
Eleanor is our social worker only for this first stage, for the initial home visit, and for a follow-up visit in her office to submit our details for a background check. After those two meetings we will never see her again, except in passing. But if she is representative of the kind of social workers we’ll encounter, then this will all go smoothly. We try to trust in that.
Near the end of October, we attend the first two-day workshop, led by social workers Caroline and Claudia. The venue is in a part of London we have never visited. We take a train, walk twenty minutes, take another train, walk twenty minutes, trying to find our way through a maze of social housing estates.
The workshop is held in a room on the top floor of a multi-use building. Chairs are arranged in a circle. Among the prospective adopters, there is a single woman and five other couples: a young couple planning to adopt the child of a family member, an older couple planning something similar, two other same-sex male couples, an opposite-sex couple roughly our age. The people we get along with best are the latter couple, Luc and Chloe. Luc, who is Belgian, works as a lawyer, and Chloe, who is British, administers a charity. Our ease with one another is less a matter of class than of education. We speak the same language in a way that the other couples do not.
As an ice-breaker, we are asked to pair up with another couple and we gravitate to Luc and Chloe. Strangely, the exercise requires that we tell the other person two true things about ourselves and one lie, and the other person has to guess what is true and what is false. In a process that requires what feels like total disclosure of the most intimate details of one’s life, couple-hood, thinking, attitudes and ideology, it seems perverse to demand that we begin with a lie. I pair up with Chloe, who easily sees through mine: I tell her I was on the high school swim team. She notes that if that were true, my shoulders would probably still be more developed than they are. I, on the other hand, do not see through hers.
The Ginger Child Page 3